Ryan by Debra Webb

SHE WILL NEVER BE A VICTIM AGAIN...
Special Agent Vivian Grace needs to find the truth before the next victim dies. Her own past as a kidnapping victim of a serial killer still haunts her. She will do whatever it takes to make sure she is never a victim again and she will do all within her power to save others... even if it means working with a burned out ex-agent who could get them both killed.

ALL HE WANTS IS TO FORGET THE PAST...
Ex-special agent Ryan McBride lost everything three years ago when a case went fatally wrong. He has spent every minute since then drinking himself into oblivion to forget. When Vivian Grace knocks on his door demanding his help, he is certain of only one thing--he cannot help her. But someone is using their dark pasts to lure them into a game and neither Ryan nor Vivian can stop the momentum.
The only certainty is that someone is going to die.

Disgraced former-FBI man Ryan McBride is in the worst state of his life since it spiralled down the drain in a case gone wrong 3 years ago, until rookie Vivian Grace stumbles into it with a case she needs to close.

It’s interesting sometimes, to read a writer’s early work to see how much of the writing has changed in the years. And I’ve found Debra Webb’s writing as always, to be faultless and very easy to get lost in. Objectively, it’s an interesting and absorbing story—if ‘Ryan’ is taken as a thriller and not as romantic suspense book—that’s well-written, with just enough development of the police procedural balanced with sufficient character-insights to keep me a happy reader.

But still, I found Ryan to be smarmy and slimy and actually cheered every time Vivian coolly responded to his filthy and inappropriate advances which felt more lecherous and disgusting than seductive. He pushed relentlessly to strip her down emotionally, yet stayed hypocritically enmeshed in his own mantrum of having his life upended while playing head games with anything or anyone associated with the FBI.

On the romantic front however, I didn’t get Ryan/Vivian’s chemistry at all. Sure, they’re flawed, they’re nowhere near the forced rainbow-HEA that we sometimes get from the unrealistic romantic fiction type endings. Yet everything between them felt antagonistic with the splash of attraction as both were ultimately, too caught up in their own self-absorbed lives to really get down to the hard part of the relationship.

I didn’t quite like this as much as I liked the first one in this series, but it’s probably more for those who don’t need things nicely tied up in a bow by the end of it all.